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March 25, 2017

Sarah Coates Harris

This post is the first of several that will reveal the lives of people whose names appear on the Esther Coates Wileman Quilt introduced to you last time. (The long absences between these posts is indicative of the research we are conducting to fully understand the quilt and the community it represents. Please bear with us!)

Sarah Coates Harris was Esther's youngest sister, born in Caln Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, on March 7, 1824. Her birth was duly recorded by the Bradford Monthly Meeting and she was the last of eight children born to Quakers Samuel and Margaret Cherrington Coates between the years of 1809 and 1824.

Sarah Coates Harris (1824-1886). Photograph courtesy of Judy

Kerr, a direct descendant of the family.

Sarah grew up in a large family home near Caln Station on the Pennsylvania Railroad, surrounded by rolling farm land and forests. Her fondness of her home is reflected in a watercolor of the house and land she painted in 1841 when she was seventeen years old.

Coates house and land painted by Sarah Coates at age seventeen. Source of image:

A Genealogy of Moses and Susanna Coates who Settled in Pennsylvania in 1717 by

Truman Coates, 1906.

Three years later, in November 1844, Sarah's sister Esther married Quaker Abram G. Wileman and moved to Marlboro Township, Stark County, Ohio. During the time leading up to this marriage, Sarah and Coates family members and friends made the quilt that Esther took with her to Ohio. Sarah Coates was one of the many family members named on the quilt.

Badly faded inscription with the name Sarah Coates on the Esther Coates Wileman Quilt.

Photograph by Lynda Salter Chenoweth.

Sarah, herself, moved to Ohio either with Esther or about the same time that Esther's marriage took her there. According to an article about Sarah in the Miners' Journal published by the Galena/Jo Daviess County Historical Society in Illinois, she spent her early twenties in Ohio where she cultivated her interest in physiology, by enrolling in a lecture series on the topic at the Marlboro Ladies Academy during 1849-1850, natural history, through extensive reading, and the women's movement and its belief in the equality of women.

Sarah appeared with in-law Elizabeth Wileman and other representatives from Marlboro at the Salem, Ohio 1850 Women's Rights Convention after calls to attend were published over their names in the Anti-Slavery Bugle and the Salem Homestead Journal during March and April, 1850. The call read, in part: "The undersigned earnestly call on the Women of Ohio to meet them in Convention on Friday, the 19th day of April next, at 10 o'clock, A.M., in the town of Salem, to concert measures to secure to all persons the recognition of Equal Rights, and the extension of the privileges of Government without distinction of sex or color." (Later in life, Sarah presided over a Woman's Suffrage Convention in her home in Galena, Illinois, that featured Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.)

Mississippi River steamboats. Source of image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sarah began giving public lectures about physiology, anatomy, and hygiene as part of her interests in these subjects. It was on a river steamboat traveling between St. Louis and St. Paul on one of her lecture tours that she met the wealthy widower Captain Daniel Smith Harris. (Much more will be written about Daniel Smith Harris next time.) They married in 1851 and she moved to Galena, Illinois, to become the mother of his five young children by his prior wife. There, they built, in 1855, an elegant home they named The Steamboat House and produced seven children of their own, two of whom died in infancy.

The Steamboat House in Galena, Illinois. Former residence of Daniel and Sarah Coates

Sarah and Daniel raised their ten surviving children in The Steamboat House which has three floors, 7,000 square feet, nine bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and seven fireplaces. Sarah's interest in botany produced fifty varieties of roses nurtured in the conservatory of the house, and beneath it runs a tunnel used to hide fugitives on the Underground Railroad until they could be moved north to Canada. Their home also served as a place for entertaining and receptions were given there for General Ulysses S. Grant, Susan B. Anthony, and British physician Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to be given a medical degree in the United States.

Elizabeth Blackwell (181-1910). Source of image: Wikimedia Commons.

According to a guest who visited the Harris home, Sarah was "[...] a noble woman, tall, fine-looking who moves about among her household gods like a queen. Although she has a large family of black-eyed rosy-cheeked children, pictures, statuary, a cabinet of rare minerals, a conservatory of beautiful plants, and a husband who thinks her little lower than the angels, she still demands the right to vote, and occasionally indulges in the luxury of public speaking. She is the moving spirit in every step of progress in Galena." (Oestreich, Winter 1999, 6.)

Sarah had attended many medical lectures and had practiced homeopathic medicine for five years before entering Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago in 1878, graduating with a M.D. the following year. Her past training and experience were accepted as the equivalent of a year of lectures at the medical school, enabling her to graduate in just one year. She set up a medical office contingent with her home only to find that the State Board of Health would not give her a certificate to practice medicine in Illinois without passing a Board of Health examination. Such an examination was required of any medical school graduates who had not attended two full years of lectures at their medical school.

Newspapers and citizens reacted in Sarah's favor and she, too, wrote in the public media about the circumstances and unfairness she was being subjected to. An article in The Daily newspaper on July 23, 1879 had this to say about Sarah's public rebuttal to the State Board of Health: "Mrs. Sarah Coates Harris, of Galena, Ill., who has been debarred from medical practices under her Hahnemann College diploma by the State Board of Health, defends herself in a very lively article, which, whatever her medical attainments may be, show that she is amply qualified to hold her own in a wordy argument. In Fact, from the way she quotes law and hurls English, the Inter Ocean [a Chicago newspaper being quoted] fancies that she has mistaken her calling, and that her place is at the bar or on the lecture forum." It turns out that Sarah was never disbarred, as stated above, but instead subjected herself to the State Board of Health examination and passed it with the highest grade ever granted by that organization. She opened her medical office and practiced medicine in Galena for the rest of her life.

Sarah passed away on February 22, 1886 at The Steamboat House. She was sixty-one years, eleven months, and ten days old at the time. Her cause of death was cancer. Sarah's obituary reported that she had left behind her husband, Daniel, four married daughters, and a seventeen-year-old son. She was buried at Greenwood Cemetery, Galena, Illinois.

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Ann Hanna Hambleton

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American Quilt Study Group

Do you know about the American Quilt Study Group (AQSG)? If not, you should. The purpose of this non-profit organization is to establish, sustain, and promote the highest standards for quilt related studies, to encourage these studies, and to provide opportunities to disseminate the work of both academic and non-academic researchers. Membership in the AQSG entitles one to receive Uncoverings, an annual journal of the research papers presented at AQSG's yearly Seminar, and a quarterly publication titled Blanket Statements containing research papers, notes and queries, as well as AQSG and quilt world news. In addition, an annual directory is provided that lists the names, contact information, and interests of current AQSG members--a valuable networking resource that gives access to approximately 950 fellow quilt enthusiasts. Click on the quilt block above to visit AQSG's web site and learn how to become a member. The site also provides information about the organization's annual Seminar, its publication opportunities, its Quilt Study program, and the Technical Guides and other publications available to members and the general public. AQSG is also on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/American-Quilt-Study-Group/149056808116.

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Mary Holton Robare's book on selected quilts from an exhibition at the Virginia Quilt Museum in 2008. Click on the book to order and search by title.

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In this 4th publication of the Ohio Quilt Series published by Ohio University Press, Lynda Salter Chenoweth presents the story of Philena Cooper Hambleton and the quilt made for her in Ohio in 1853 to take with her when she migrated to Iowa. To order, click on the book and then search by title.

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Lynda Salter Chenoweth's second book based on her research into Philena's quilt tells the stories of those whose names appear on the quilt and places their lives in context. To order, click on the book and then search by title.

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Copyright

(c) 2011-2017 Lynda Salter Chenoweth and Mary Holton Robare. Absolutely no reproduction or distribution permitted beyond one copy for personal study. For additional permissions regarding text please e-mail lchen@saber.net. All images are reproduced with permission of copyright holders. Any commercial or online use is strictly forbidden.

Lynda Salter Chenoweth

Mary Holton Robare

About Us

Lynda and Mary are quilt historians experienced in researching and publishing information about quilts made by members of the Religious Society of Friends. Their particular interest is in 19th century inscribed quilts that document Quaker families and their communities.
Lynda lives in Sonoma,California, and is a writer, a quilter, a researcher, and a member of the Board of the American Quilt Study Group. Mary lives in Winchester, Virginia, and is a writer, a researcher, and a choreographer and dance instructor.